Pat's Voice.

Last week I saw this post on LinkedIn from a very talented writer, called Pat Feehery. You can see Pat's work here. (I get ten-percent if you hire him. Thanks, Pat.)

I loved Pat's boldness. And even more, his observation that very few people write "human" anymore. Every one is so busy trying to sound professional, that about 98.7-percent of the time, they sound, instead, like nitwits.

If you've ever been asked by your tenth-grader to read a school essay, you know what I mean. Rather than just writing, they're trying to sound "smart." Just like business people try to sound "professional," or dignified. It usually backfires, and they sound officious and convoluted. It's why every airline in the world calls your eating surface a "tray-table," rather than either a tray or a table--either would suffice. It's how we've gone from "personnel" (which was bad) to "human resources" which is even worse.

In any event, I wrote to Pat and asked him to write a piece on all this for this humble blog. 

It's here. 

And it's human.

Thanks, Pat:

I’m weird. I always have been.

 

But here’s the thing, I’ve always been hyper-aware of my weirdness, to the point where I spend more time figuring out how people want me to respond than just being myself. The higher I’ve climbed in my career, the worse this has gotten.

When I was younger, I’d have to consciously tone down my passion for work, told it came across as too much. Now, as I’ve taken on more executive roles, it’s morphed into trying to navigate overly complicated corporate vernacular and abbreviations.

 

And here’s the kicker: people can tell. In interviews, I’m awkward. I’m not myself. It’s like when you have a crush, and every time you try to talk to them, the words tumble out like you’ve never strung a sentence together in your life. All the while, your brain is screaming, This isn’t how I talk. 

 

So, last Friday night, I was scrolling through the recommended jobs section and stumbled upon a posting for a healthcare company. It wasn’t the type of job I’d usually consider. In fact, I’ve never even worked on a healthcare brand. But something about the job description stopped me.

 

It wasn’t the job itself. It was how it was written.

 

You could tell it was written by the CEO. It wasn’t full of fluff. It was detailed but also raw, personal, and passionate. Everything was in the first person. You could feel the energy and purpose in their words.

 

I didn’t have half the qualifications for the role, but I applied anyway. Why? Because they asked a single, straightforward question: “Why are you interested in the job?”

 

Here was my response:

 

“I read your job description, and I’m addressing you directly because you used “I.” That’s refreshing. Most of the time, job posts feel robotic, but yours didn’t, and I respect that. Let me be clear: I’m not your typical fucking candidate (or “f*ing,” as you politely put it for LinkedIn’s delicate sensibilities).

 

I’m a creative first. My job isn’t to make everyone like you; it’s to create a narrative for your brand that makes the right people believe in you.

 

I don’t speak fluent CMO jargon, but I know how to craft a great fucking story. What I need from you? A great fucking product. Give me that, and I’ll amplify the voice you used in your job description to levels you didn’t know it could reach.

 

Healthcare brands need differentiation. Enough with the bathtubs and sunflower fields. You’re not connecting with real people when you do that. People who are scared, who see those cheesy ads and think, ‘That’s not me. I’ll never be that happy.’

 

I may not seem like the obvious choice for this job, but I promise you this: I can do it and I’ll be damn good at it.”

——

 

When I finished writing it, I realized I couldn’t let it go to waste, not knowing if anyone would even see it. So, I turned it into content. An advertisement for myself. Since posting it, the response has been overwhelming—new connections, fresh opportunities, and even people I haven’t talked to in years reaching out. I don’t have many expectations when there are hundreds of applicants but it was great to hear my voice again. 

--

Thanks for your voice, Pat.

To the Dogs.

if the link doesn't play, click here.

As I enter the 68th month of my busy season, a neighbor's two-year-old golden retriever, Izzy, has had a sleepover with Sparkle, my 15-month-old golden retriever.

On January 14, 2020, having just worked through the alleged Christmas holiday hiatus--writing a speech for a CEO because "I was the only one who could write it"--I was fired. Fired though I made the agency much more money than I cost. Fired though the CEO said to me she cried.

I was fired.

Impersonally. Robotically. Un-caringly. Bull-shittily. Un-fairly. For no reason other than they didn't want people with high-salaries around. It was bad for morale. Theirs. 

Then I was maligned by the CEO of the entire holding company who said that the people who were fired "harkened back to the 80s." Whereas he himself, who makes 300 times what his median worker makes, harkens back to the 1880s, that is, the Robber Baron Era.

When I started GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I had a simple aim. I said to myself (the only one who listens to me) "I'm not starting a new agency just to act like an old agency." 

I also thought of a line I wrote about my parents and my upbringing. "No one is totally useless. They can always serve as a bad example."

In other words, I would not just start a new agency, I would kick my old agency's ass.

Today, as I enter year six with GeorgeCo., my revenue, my margins, the quality and the quantity of my work way outstrips that of my Alma Mater. I'm not only bigger and more profitable and better than Ogilvy, I'm more viable. I have more upside. I'm more important to more CEOs, and I'm attracting more business. 

And I don't even practice borderless creativity.

One of the reasons I've been able so quickly to swamp the old scions of Madison Avenue is that I am not impecunious. (That means cheap.)

Yes, I don't like spending money. But I do when it works to get more work done, better work done, and when it helps my clients and me in the process.

Let me get to the pith of my post, or the post of my pith.

Now that Ogilvy are calling their workers back to their cramped and unlovely offices four days a week, I am further convinced that Ogilvy itself, and maybe the entirety of WPP will be about as viable as Stellantis, Intel, Kodak or Gateway computers. 

They don't make anything anyone wants.

Part of that is because they just parrot trends without actually thinking about what's good for their people, their clients or their work.

I started this post talking about having two golden retrievers over during my long busy season. I quickly thought about all the corporate ass-wipe-itudes telling us for years about the efficacy and the creativity of having an "open-plan" workspace.

No one in the entirety of the advertising industry said anything like "We save $1,000,000 on rent. We can spend that money on salaries where it will be put to better use." No. They just stuffed people into cramped hot-desks and repeatedly lied about that work arrangement.

Now look at the video above.

That's what it's having an eight-page manifesto due tomorrow and having to write it in an open-plan office.

That in a nutshell is the wisdom of Holding Company Madison Avenue.

Feral unintelligence.

Woof.

Untrue.

Late last week, I decided to start a game. Or at least an experiment.

I would count all the lies I was hit with every day. Automatic lies like an Alexa saying good morning, trying to convince you through a linguistic conceit of its humanity. Or lies of overblown salesmanship like a YouTube video saying it’s a complete film when it’s really just a clip. A 73-second clip that demands you watch 180-seconds of commercials.

Even autocorrect, which promises one thing and delivers another, I’d count as a lie. Who are they, a mere algorithm, suggesting they know better than I do what I intend to write. What's more, predictive text is very non-New York. How dare you lie about your intelligence then auto-misspell "oy vey" to "it vets," or "mazel tov" to "madeline too."

As a concession to the work I get paid to do, I’d stop counting each day when I got to 100. This would let me end the game likely before 10 AM and let me get on with life. 

I wouldn't count lies from politicians if they were promises in good faith. Or promises that could be accomplished by policy and luck. But when a liar says, "I'll end inflation on day one," especially when that liar is a seven-time bankrupt and the president has no power to "stop" inflation, that I'd count as a lie. It's a blatant attempt to fool people.

I wouldn’t count lies of interpretation unless they were egregious. So if my wife said to me, you look thin, I won’t count that. I have lost weight. If however she ever says, you have washboard abs, I’ll count that. Right after our divorce.

Mostly (because there are so many of them--trying to ignore them is like trying to fight a land-war in Asia) I'll be tallying ads and notices like these, a fairly random sampling from nine minutes on LinkedIn. 

They're advertising writ by Polonius. William Hazlitt described Polonius as "a busy-body, [who] is accordingly officious, garrulous, and impertinent​." Others describe him as a "foolish prating knave" and a windbag. Shakespeare​ himself sums him up as a "tedious old fool." I can't be the only one who sees ads and statements and regards them like this.

I also here have to fault what's left of the trade press who have be completely derelict and complicit in their current coverage of the ad industry. As once giant ad complexes like BBDO or Ogilvy have shrunk from employing thousands of people, to the point today where they employ just hundreds, this news has not at all be covered. Instead ginned up awards and fake ads and non-news like this.

This is like reporting from a battlefield where 50,000 have died and writing a story about the soldier with the neatest tent.

I suppose the point in all this is that we're living in a Poloniusian world. As an industry, we have to be better than this. We have to know when we're lying. And we have to know that everyone else knows too.

In a trumpler world where no one can any longer distinguish what's real from what's fake, we as ad people and our clients have to try to be better, truer, honester.

Honest in everything a brand says, does and shows. Including from what used to be agency brands. Including what are today disgustedly called personal brands.

If a brand is a promise to a consumer, we have to make sure that our promises are built on trust and truth, not dust and bushwa.

That's our job.

Thank you for your time today.

It means the world to me.

Lies. Lies. Lies. Lies.

SuAIcide.

Since the onslaught of hype with the advent of whatever AI protocol is crotch of the day, I've noticed about 32-quintillion posts on LinkedIn promoting some video that someone made for 24¢ in twelve minutes. 

I watched one the other day and it was horrid. Lazy, regurgitated, soul-and-life-less. And I couldn't care less about how cheap and how fast you blight the world with your artificially derived projectile regurgitation.

Here's a word for you. Look it up on your AI.

It was solipsistic: Important to you only because it's about you.

As I descend further and further into my dotage and decrepitude, I watch less and less TV. About six months ago, I finally gave up watching the TV game show Jeopardy! because it had turned to be too much about small talk and pop-culture, and too little about genuinely interesting information. After 15 years of watching it with some regularity, I gave it up cold tofu.

Even the Knicks, who seem decent this year, I find unwatchable. And as for football and baseball, I find the games excruciating and dull, the announcers worse, and the over-emphasis on stats deadening to my brain. Like it deadens the brains of the CTE-afflicted young men who concuss their lives for your gladiatorial benefit.

What's more, on my Mac, I've installed every privacy adjunct known to the Chinese government and our surveillance capitalist state. I get dumb promoted posts, usually featuring a big-bosomed woman chopping onions, but seldom a bona-fide ad, as if there is such a thing as a bona-fide ad anymore.

In short, I seldom see anything of interest from the world of advertising unless it comes from someone in the world of advertising and therefore, somehow, gets through my defenses and reaches me.

That is to say, while I make my not-inconsiderable income from advertising, I have very little intercourse with what's left of the advertising business. Of course, when I see in Ad Age a commercial like this (I can't download it for some reason) it's the equivalent of going to a restaurant and afterwards getting Norovirus and vomiting for 96-hours. It would take wild rats to drag me back. Or wild horses.

For all the years I lived in Manhattan, most of my long life, I've walked by news kiosks that usually sold a variety of horse racing forms. If you were into the ponies, you could see who was running, where, who the jockey was, and the odds. If you weren't, these periodicals were completely invisible. You'd just as likely see them as you would individual particles of nitrogen in the air you breathe.

Most ads are like the racing form. 

People, as Howie said, read what interests them. But most people don't bother making anything interesting. 

Too much work.

About 35 years ago, after I had become the youngest Senior Vice President and Group Creative Head at Ally & Gargano, I was asked to teach a class at the School of Visual Arts. My colleague, Neal Raphan, was a long-time teacher there. Still is.

 

He gave me a sheaf of papers that somewhat codified what a creative director does, to help teach the students to scrutinize the efficacy of their own work.

I've kept that sheaf for all these years and tinkered with it through the years. Though it's stayed essential the same. Because people have stayed essentially the same since we came down from sleeping in trees as the woodlands climate-changed into a savannah.

For about ten years, I've been ranting that people have stopped caring about ads and even brands because ads and even brands have stopped caring about them.

The following could help. Maybe we can teach it to machines so they don't suck so loud.

But there's no one left who cares.

Mistakes.

Back in the 1960s, perhaps the two greatest basketball players on our planet were Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. 

Wilt had the gaudier stat line. In fact, in one season, 1961-1962, he averaged 50 points a game and nearly 26 rebounds. He finished, astonishingly, second in the MVP voting to his nemesis, Bill Russell. Russell averaged 17 points a game and 24 rebounds. Russell's Celtics won 60 games and the NBA championship. Chamberlain's Warriors won 49 games and were beaten by the Celts 4-3 in the Eastern Division Finals. 

For my entire long and sad life, roundball aficionados have argued who was the better player. The two faced each other 147 times--roughly two entire seasons of games. Chamberlain consistently outscored and out-rebounded Russell. But Russell's Celts won 87 of those games to 60 for Chamberlain's Warriors. And Russell won eleven championship rings to Chamberlain's two.

(If one agency won more awards, and the other, more business and produced more good work--who's to say which is better.)

In 1965, it was front page news when Chamberlain signed a contract with the Warriors for $100,000, a mammoth amount in that era when basketball was a relatively minor sport, sports salaries hadn't climbed to today's halcyon heights, and Black people simply earned less. (The median US wage in that year was about $7,000.)

Moments after Chamberlain signed his $100,000 contract, Red Auerbach, the General Manager of the Celtics tore up Bill Russell's contract. 

He immediately sent him a new one--Russell didn't have to ask--for $100,001. Auerbach guaranteed that Russell would be the highest-paid basketball player on earth. Russell deserved no less.

My point today has nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with people who work hard for a living and do nothing to look out for themselves. 

Since I started in the ad business back in the early 1980s, my sense is that agency salaries have decreased. This makes sense, of course. About three-in-four agency jobs are controlled by three giant holding companies. Like giant oil companies, giant airlines, giant telcos, giant food companies use their vast size and reach to control pricing on the things they sell, there's no reason to believe advertising holding companies aren't doing the same on the people they buy.

That leaves the people who work in the business--you and me--with very little leverage. You take the wages they offer. Which is, in most cases, better than not working. Most people of a certain career tenure are working more and earning less and have fewer perks than they had a few decades ago.

For five years I've been running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company. One of the hardest things you have to do when you run your own business is figure out what to charge.

I'd guess, next to worrying about finding work, worries about what to charge have cost more people more sleepless nights than Scarlett Johannson in string bikini.

If you price yourself too low, you're costing yourself money and basically saying to the world, "I'm not very good and I don't cost very much. You can get me cheap." You're supermarket donuts in a world of premium brands. Stale, meh and also-ran.

If you price yourself too high, you might be costing yourself work. Because there are always cheaper alternatives who are easier for clients to buy. You might be high-octane gasoline in a world that runs on regular. Why pay more, as the phrase goes.

What you need to think about is Bill Russell.

What you need to think about is who you are.

What you need to create--before you create a single ad or powerpoint--is a positioning for yourself and your services. 

Russell was the winningest of all basketball players. The one to pick if you want to be number one.

What you need to do is to find a way to sell yourself that's  woven into the price you charge. That way of selling yourself isn't a testable proposition. But if the work you have to show and your reputation backs it up, you can belly-up to the bar and try.

The point is to have an articulated positioning (reinforced by the work you do, the recommendations you've gotten and your general reputation) and set your price according to that positioning.

If you have recommendations and work that says, "this person is unusually talented," charging like everyone else is shooting yourself in the foot and selling yourself short. There will always be people who say you aren't worth it, or that so-and-so is better than you.

People, I'm sure, said to Russell that he's no Chamberlain. In the 1964 NBA Finals for instance (Chamberlain's Philadelphia squad had relocated to San Francisco) Chamberlain swamped Russell statistically, outscoring him 29 to 11 and out-rebounding him 27 to 25. 

Though Russell's Celtics won the series 4-1, people could easily have sullied Russell, perhaps shaken his confidence. Like so many people in our business say, "how could you charge that? So-and-so charges way less."

The point here is to not let anyone but yourself determine what you're worth. The point is to do the work of working to get your work valued more highly.

Some months ago I was working for a saber-toothed Venture Capitalist who I knew was going to balk at my day-rate. He might even say, "you charge three times as much as what other people charge."

I prepared myself for that.

Before our negotiation I walked along perhaps the wealthiest residential street in the world, Park Avenue between 72nd and 79th. I took a photo of every workman's van parked along the street and went home, called a handful and found their hourly rate.

When my potential client balked at my price, which I knew he would, I was ready. "I charge less than a Park Avenue plumber charges. And they start charging you the moment they leave their office in Queens."

I had also prepared a sentence that I used as my screen saver for half a decade. Something to think about, a strategy of sorts and maybe a guilt trip.

"I'm sure you can find someone to do the work at a price you're willing to pay."

Or as my mother taught me negotiating for trousers on the Lower East Side in 1972, "it's still my money and they're still your pants."

Back to my venture capital negotiation above, I got the job and my rate.

Thanks, Mr. Russell.

(Elbows out when you're going for the ball.)

Dirt Washing.

Over the last 15,000 to 20,000 years of Homo Sapiens existence, as a species, we've lived through all kinds of washing. 

I'd imagine that all kinds of polytheists during the years of 

Akhenaten (3500 years or so ago) pretended to abide by the Pharoah's orders and pretended to be monotheists, so as not to be buried in a heap of ashes until suffocation takes over. I'd imagine a lot of people pretended to be into Yahweh, who secretly kept a picture of the golden calf on their iPhones.

Certainly, 700 years or so ago in what's now Spain and Portugal, a lot of Jews pretended to be Christians so as to avoid Torquemada's personal pan auto da fé. I'd guess in the "new World," there were more Jews in 16th Century lands that are today New Mexico than there are today. But they were Goy-washing. You know, so as not to get burnt at the all you can eat stake-house.

More recently, of course, brands have "African-American-washing," "Asian-washing," "Women's-washing," "LGBTQ+

-washing" and just about "Everything-You-Can-Shake-a-stick-at-washing." Of course, purpose-washing and green-washing are almost everywhere. You can usually spot these when a $16 Billion corporation adds a pattern to their logo on LinkedIn. For an entire week!

Lately, I've noticed a different kind of washing that really makes me feel dirty. Filthy, in fact.

I'm going to call it "Family-Washing."

In a nutshell, Family-Washing is most-pernicious when people and entities who are callous, mean and inhuman reassure you that when you work with them or buy from them, "you're family."

This happens at airlines, hotels, agencies, all sorts "drive-cost-out-of-the-system-and-therefore-service-so-we-can-maximize-profit-and-executive-bonuses-to-the-exclusion-of-decent-treatment" entities. The more an entity operates based on low-bidding, the more likely they are to tell you you're "family."

If your airplane seat is sized to fit no ass larger than that of a  Capuchin monkey (see above) you can be sure that some crackling loud speaker in words so fast you can barely understand what they're saying will welcome you to "Sudden-Drop-In-Cabin-Pressure Air." Who's slogan is "you're as likely to find your luggage as you are to find common courtesy." At Sudden-Drop-In-Cabin-Pressure Air, "we treat you like family." (So what if it's Joan Crawford's family.)

In the agency world, you get traife like this: "I admire people with gentle manners who treat other people as human beings." To which, an astute observer would append: "That's why we have a 67% annual attrition rate, offer no salary increases, make people work over-time for no extra pay, and fire everyone over 50. We're Family, like the Mansons."

Then there's my local grocery store, where you couldn't find anyone to ask a question of and the meat slicers rarely have time to take a break from coughing in the pastrami. They're not a grocery store anymore. They're my family market. 

I know, I'll go there and buy two cousins, an aunt, and four nephews. Plus, my family doesn't make me pay for bags, ignore me, make me wait on long lines, and routinely sell past-expiration-date chicken.

Worst of all is my last example. I just deposited some money into my grandson's 529 account. Assuming there's a country in 15 years, it would be nice if he had some money for college. And for the time being, I get a small tax deduction.

Within minutes of making my annual deposit, I got this ad from a company associated with the company I have my 529 with, Fidelity. I "buy" something, and immediately my name is brokered. Thanks, fam.

This humble blog gets about 80,000 readers a week. I presume most of those readers at some point came from some sort of family, even if, like I was, you were raised by wolves.

Have any of you ever posed like the people in the photograph below? 

I can't think of a better way to share head-lice, beard-lice, and general nausea.

We're family!

By the way, back about 75-years-ago, when it appeared the United States and its Allies had defeated the Nazis, many of those who had collaborated and worked for the Nazis and participated in their murder, theft, abuse and generalized horrors underwent a process called Persilschein.

Persilschein literally means Persil ticket. It's named, in part, after Persil, popular laundry detergent. Nazi collaborators and sympathizers (if they had enough money and were valuable enough to Western anti-communists) could receive (for pay or for free) a Persilschein. It essentially stated, no matter how dirty they were, that they had a clean political past. All that Nazi-stuff, poof, disappeared, like your victims.

I would assume, in the spirit of "washing" that is the subject of this post, that many of the trump-cohorts who are now in the process of destroying America's democratic principles, will receive "Swifferschein." Certifications named after the popular Proctor & Gamble excreta.

I am often accused of having a certain kind of genius. I think Swifferschein shows that genius off. Because we clean our homes (Swiffer is a $500,000,000 brand) with one of the dirtiest products this side of trump's cranial merkin.

As Orwell might have written, family are foes. And clean is dirty.

 

Digging Data.

I said to my wife the other day that if I had been an academic like I set out to be, I likely wouldn't be as well-read or broadly knowledgeable about so many things as I am today. I'd likely be down a rabbit hole without a paddle and mixing metaphors like the mafia mixes cement.

This isn't idle chatter.

There's actually an advertising point.

Something the industry has forgotten.

But back to my catholic style of reading or learning. No, not Catholic as in the Church's co-opting of that word. But catholic, small c, with the word's original meaning. (My father taught me that meaning--and I remember at 15 or 16 questioning him about it. Like me, or me like him, he was among the most active-learners I have ever encountered.) 

In any event, I just finished reading a book called "Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology" by Eric H. Cline, the head of the department of Archaeology at George Washington University. It sets out to give lay-dimwits like myself an orientation into archaeology, it's history, development, successes, setbacks, superstars and more.

I chose it because I believe advertising people, like good archaeologists and explorers in general must dig to find facts. Facts ain't found in powerputz (my Slip Mahoney-ism for powerpoint).

Considering that I'm not an archaeologist, and won't even dig in my wife's expansive gardens, I've read a lot of archaeology including two other books by Cline, both of which were from in Yale's "Turning Points in History" series. 

As an advertising person, I read archaeology because l am in search of what Bernbach called "simple, timeless human truths." They ain't coming from some business-book pablum. Those universal ideas about humanity come over massive sweeps of time and the perspective gained over time. Getting out of the quotidian stürm und drang lets you see things you can't when you're bailing out seawater to keep from drowning or sinking. Or stinking.

If you're wondering what the big schmear is about 1177 BC in two of Cline's many books, no, it's not the year I was born. It was a period when the civilized world seem to break down. Cities were destroyed, international trade ceased, religions failed, disease was endemic and huge swaths of populations perished. These happenstances had always been attributed to the "Sea People," whose arrival heralded doom. But Cline investigates and brings in other seismic events--like climate change, earthquakes and volcanoes and more. All of which precipitated a butterfly effect of change upon the world.

I started reading about the collapse of everything a couple of decades ago. It seems a proper overture to the opera that's coming.

But back to the first book I mentioned, Cline's "Three Stones Make a Wall." The title is based on the axiomatic ditty above. And, at long last, is the point of today's post.

What I'm learning from Cline is something I'd never learn if I only read, as so many marketing people do, books about marketing (usually written by people who have never done any real marketing. That is, they've never sold anything.)

In Three Stones, Cline traces the origins of archaeology, from its 16th Century treasure-hunting days at Herculaneum and Pompeii which were buried by the Vesuvian volcanic explosion in 79 CE, through to Schliemann's "discovery" of Priam's Troy, to Carter finding Tut's tomb and riches, to the advancements of the modern day.

All along, archaeologists have been using data. Ancient books, shards popping up through the soil, to word of mouth. Today, archaeology is veritably data-based. Like advertising is allegedly data-based.

What I've learned from Cline, however, is I think in advertising we're doing data wrong. 

In advertising, we look at thin slices of data from one or two different perspectives. By then, we've spent all the time we were scoped for and draw our conclusions. We write our insipitude and can claim our advertising was "data-driven," thus justifying the billions our holding-company overlords have spent acquiring so-called data companies. We even give awards for best use of data and we assume that data gives answers rather than instead leading you to smarter questions.

Data to archaeologists is a bug's eye. It's fractal and includes different sorts of data, aerial reconnaissance, ground penetrating radar, Lidar, and various chemical and mineral techniques to locate and date different ground layers. Also used are a dozen or a hundred other techniques. In fact, sixty years ago when a 4000-year-old shipwreck with its cargo virtually in-tact was discovered off of Bodrum, Turkey, archaeologists didn't turn to sonar to find more shipwrecks, they asked area sponge divers. "Been there, dove that."

Data isn't a complete action in time. It's on-going. It's a guide, not an endpoint. Despite all the singers of the singularity, you need people to add up rows of numbers and draw conclusions. You should also never forget that data is a perspective, a way of looking at things. It's maybe not why.

I'm not sure how data really works in advertising. Or if it's just a pseudo-scientific adjunct of what many call "surveillance capitalism," and that it's more about targeting (or stalking) than human behaviors.

BTW, I wrote this ten days ago and the article below I just read in The Economist today. It doesn't exact cement my points (if you can find them) but somehow I think we might be pissing up the same rope. Here are three passages that may underscore my sense of the sense of data.

--

--

And the best of the three:

I will end this with this story which I believe illuminates what "data" really means, and for that matter, the word "insight."

Some time ago, I read an obituary of the man who founded one of America's approximately 30,000 "dollar" stores. They're discount stores where most everything sells for just a dollar. Someone asked him about his genius in locating the stores in just the right neighborhoods. They had to be downtrodden enough to need a dollar store, yet prosperous enough so people had money to spend. It's a tough needle to thread and this guy apparently did it.

He said, "I looked at strip mall parking lots. If the asphalt had oil stains in the parking places, I knew I had to right place. Rich people's cars don't leak oil. My customers' cars do."

He could have looked at rows and rows of demographic information, household income, employment rates, rise in rents, gentrification or ghettoization.

Instead he looked at oil stains.

That, my friends, is archaeology. It's using data. It's an insight.

In 40 years of advertising, I've heard about three things that smart. 

Data isn't a perspective. It's one-hundred. And even then, you're only just getting started. Data is observation and thinking. It's not one source of looking at things--it's many. 

We should try it.

I think.

A Visit from my Father.

I don't believe in spooks, haunts, ghosts, specters or spectres, spirits, goblins, any form of the after-life, or even god, but having had many of the people closest to me perish all-too-soon, I do believe I am occasionally visited by something that sends me into a swirl.

The visits are usually flashes of memories or a feeling or even a shudder that feels like a hand holding mine or an arm, attempting to reassure me, not strangle me, finding its way around my narrowing shoulders.

Since my sister died in a horrific motorcycle crash at the age of just 47 back in 2007, she's visited me the most. Mostly Nancy appears during those moments I would have liked most to have her around. When I'm grilling a giant feast on my back patio, and my elder daughter and her family are visiting at our beach house on the sea in Connecticut. Or when I'm walking with Sparks, my golden retriever, on the empty beach off season and she's chasing birds, running through the surf, or fetching something that seemingly was put on earth to give her joy. 

Nancy was always astute. She could read moods with the acuity attained only by those most beaten by the world and therefore most wary. She learned, a survival skill, to read the room and to know when she was most wanted and when she was not.

Occasionally she obliges, and I feel the tentative grip of her small hand. When I feel that squeeze, odd as this may sound given the state of the world, suddenly all seems ok. I feel stronger, happier, even, again just for a moment, that I haven't fucked up everything just by being alive. When someone gone comes back, even if it's merely a mirage, it's like finding a twenty in an old suit pocket.

Lately, however, my father has been taking to dropping by. And like my father always was, he's most present when he's least needed. Inappropriateness, a kind of cosmic maladroitness, was always his metier. Though he's been dead for nearly a quarter of a century--and nearly dead for a quarter of a century before that, his timing hasn't improved with either time or decay.

It's strange, actually, that my father visits me. I left his cacophonously quiet house when I was just 17--against his wishes. I left, ran away actually, deferring college to play baseball for a long season in the Mexican Baseball League, and we didn't much talk after that. I suppose I could joke and say I never ever had a heart-to-heart with him, but that's not funny, considering each of us was born, essentially, without a heart.

Even so, just about two hours ago on a Sunday afternoon just a couple of days from New Year's, I was getting undressed to take a shower, and there in the tiled bathroom with me as I was taking a variety of prescription medicines various doctors have sentenced me to, appeared my father.

I tried to brush him away as I had always done with him and with most anything else I felt annoyed by. I never played much of a game of tennis, but my human-expelling backhand makes Chrissie Evert's look positively weak and grade-school. 

"Geordie," he began. He was the only one who ever added the "d" to Georgie, and no one calls me Georgie except women who want things from me I either can't give or would get in trouble if I did.

"Geordie," he said, "remember that time in Saks, it was a Saturday and I was looking at hats."

"Yeah, I remember," I grunted. "I couldn't have been more than eight or nine. Maybe you were supposed to be buying Mom a birthday gift or something but got stuck looking for fedoras."

"She was impossible to buy for," he admitted. "D'ya remember the salesman we met at the hat department?"

I remembered my father saw the salesman before the salesman saw my father and my father tried hard to get away before he caught the salesman's eye. He acted like a kid caught on an old person's lawn.

"D'ya remember the salesman we met at the hat department?"

I didn't answer him. Not answering has always been my chief conversational strength.

"You remember? Yeah. I was mortified. That sales-guy had been a copywriter at an agency I worked at. He got old young."

I liked the line and played it back for my father the way in an ad agency you might look at the tape of a commercial over and again because you liked it or hated it.

"He got old young. And as I moved up, he was moved out. Fired. Now he was selling hats at Saks."

"You went out of your way to get out of the way," I said to my father. "You were uncomfortable."

I was done ingesting my pills: statins, a blood pressure thing, another something or other and one or two more that I'm sure give the notion of being a placebo a bad name. I stepped into the shower and began adjusting the spray. The more expensive your home renovation, the more likely it is that you'll get scalded.

"I wasn't uncomfortable," my father said. He was nearly inaudible and it wasn't from the clamor of the steam against the expensive Italian tile. 

"I wasn't uncomfortable," my father said again. "I was scared. I was scared I was old and dead and I'd be selling hats out of my keister."

"There's an image," I mumbled into a soapy washcloth. 

Like the steam on the glass enclosure of the shower, my father vaporized into nothing--leaving behind mere droplets in places he never was. I squeeged the rest of him away and then squeegeed the shower tiles dry. When you live in the suburbs  black mold and mildew are like neighbors who park their cars on their front lawn. You don't want anything to do with them. 

Now there was nothing left of my father but I heard him still, though he was never still.

"Don't get old young, Geordie." Then he returned like a stray pixel. "Don't get old old, Geordie."